Edmund Gosse

“ He says: "The flush of dawn is not so lovely as the earliest experiences of gloire. Gloire makes heroes beautiful." Again: "Nothing is so essential as renown, and nothing so surely gives renown as merit; these are things that reason itself has united, and why should we distinguish true gloire from merit, which is the source of it, and of which it is the proof?" This moral union of merit, glory and renown, in triple splendour revolving round each other, was the main object of Vauvenargues' contemplation, and he admits that the central passion of his life was "l'amour de la gloire." ”

“ You will not find in the pages of Vauvenargues a distinct revival of that passion for the very soil of France, "la terre sainte, la douce France," which inspired the noble "Chanson de Roland" and has been so strongly accentuated in the recent struggle for Alsace-Lorraine. But he recalled to the memory of a generation which had grown densely material the forgotten ideal of France as the champion of chivalry. We must not forget that we possess in the writings of Vauvenargues merely the commencements of reflection, the first fruit of a life which was broken before its summer was complete. ”

“ If we take some of the most cynical and savage maxims of La Rochefoucauld we may see that conciseness could proceed no further: for instance, "Virtue is a rouge that women add to their beauty"; or "Pride knows no law and self-love no debt"; or "The pleasure of love is loving." The ingenuity of man has not devised a mode of saying those particular things as exactly in fewer words. They reach the maximum of conciseness, and are therefore called maxims.
It is very unusual in the history of literature to be able to point to a man of genius as the positive founder of a class of work. ”

“ He knew his feebleness, but he refused to let it depress him; "labour to get gloire is not lost," he said, "if it tends to make us worthy of it." In his curious mixture of simplicity and acuteness, in his gravity and ardour, he was morally just like the best types which this great war has produced, he is like Paul Lintier in France, like Julian Grenfell among ourselves, meeting the worst blows of fate with serenity and almost with ecstasy, with no shadow of indignation or rebellion. ”

“ Everybody wishes to be happy; that is the aim of all the acts of life. Spurious men of the world and spurious men of piety only seek for the appearance of virtue, and I believe that in matters of morality, Seneca was a hypocrite and Epicurus was a saint. I know of nothing in the world so beautiful as nobility of heart and loftiness of mind: from these proceeds that perfect integrity which I set above all other qualities, and which seems to me, at my present stage of life, to be of more price than a royal crown. ”

“ It was part of the constructive genius of Vauvenargues to find the aim and joy of life in a combination of sentiment and action, in a community of rivals amiably striving for the crown with fellowmen of like instincts and of like experience. He was of all moralists the least solitary; he had spent his life as a soldier among soldiers, among those who did their best, in the midst of hardships, to live a life of pleasure without reflection. ”

“ In considering the cases of many of these brilliant and sympathetic young French officers, who had already published or have left behind them works in verse and prose, there may be a disposition, in the wonderful light of their experience, to exaggerate the positive value of their productions. Not all of them, of course, have contributed, or would have contributed, durable additions to the store of the literature of France. We see them, excusably, in the rose-light of their sunset. ”

“ Out of the empty welter of the Fronde there grew with surprising rapidity the conception of a central and united polity of France which has gone on advancing and developing, and, in spite of outrageous revolutionary earthquakes, persisting ever since. We find La Rochefoucauld, as a moral teacher, with his sardonic smile, actually escaping out of the senseless conflict, and starting, with the stigmata of the scuffle still on his body, a surprising new theory that the things of the soul alone matter, and that love of honour is the first of the moral virtues. ”

“ We must read La Rochefoucauld closely to perceive why a book so searching, and even so cruel as his, has exercised on the genius of France a salutary and a lasting influence. His savage pessimism is not useless, it is not a mere scorn of humanity and a sneer at its weaknesses. It tends, by stripping off all the shams of conduct and digging to the root of action, to make people upright, candid and magnanimous on a new basis of truth. ”

“ The fervour and the emotion are there still, but they are kept in reserve, they are below the surface, "at the bottom of the heart," as La Rochefoucauld puts it.
Heroism is now restrained by a sense of the prodigious length and breadth of the contest, by the fact, at last patent to the most unthinking, that the war is an octopus which has wound its tentacles about every limb and every organ of the vitality of France. A revelation of the overwhelming violence of enormous masses of men has broken down the tradition of chivalry. ”

“ I am fond of general reading, but that in which I find something to fashion the mind and to fortify the soul is what I like best. Above all it gives me an extreme satisfaction to read in company with an intelligent person, for in this way one is kept constantly reflecting on what one reads, and the reflections thus exchanged form a species of conversation than which no other in the world is so agreeable or so useful. I give a sound opinion about works in verse and prose which are submitted to me, but perhaps I allow myself too much freedom in expressing that opinion. ”

“ He was content to be the violent and fantastic swashbuckler of the half-rebellious court of Louis XIII. In late life, he crystallized his past into a maxim, "Youth is a protracted intoxication; it is the fever of the soul." Fighting and love-making, petty politics and scuffle upon counter-scuffle—such was the life of the young French nobleman of whom La Rochefoucauld reveals himself and is revealed by others as the type and specimen. ”

“ If he is angry and sardonic, it is because he sees, or thinks he sees, falsehood everywhere masquerading as virtue. His foremost duty was to pluck the mask from the false virtues which strutted everywhere through the society and literature of France. Voltaire recognized nothing else in La Rochefoucauld but this sardonic misanthropy, this determination to prove that man is guided solely by self-interest. This Voltaire thought was the seule vérité contained in the "Maximes," and in a measure he was right. The moralist saw amour-propre as an Apollyon straddling right across the pathway of mankind ”

“ He has had beautiful dreams, he has bad ones: what am I saying? people don't dream as he has lived. No one has ever extracted out of a destiny more than he has. The preposterous and the commonplace are equally familiar to him. He has shone, he has suffered, he has dragged along a humdrum existence: nothing has escaped him.... He is an enigma, a riddle that can probably be never solved."
La Bruyère aimed at the improvement of human nature. La Rochefoucauld had said, "Don't be ridiculous—a blatant love of self is the only spring of your being." ”

“ It would be idle not to admit that La Rochefoucauld has been almost exclusively regarded as the chief exponent of egotism among the great writers of Europe. He has become—he became during his own lifetime— the bye-word for bitterness. He is represented as believing that egotism is the primum mobile of all human action, and that man is wholly the victim of his passions, which lead him whither they will. He denies all spirituality and sees a physical cause for everything we do. ”

“ It is a complete mistake to look upon La Rochefoucauld as a monster, or even as a Timon. Without insisting, at all events for the moment, on the plain effect of his career on his intellect, but yet accepting the evidence that much of his bitterness was the result of bad health, sense of failure, shyness, foiled ambition, we have to ask ourselves what he gave to French thought in exchange for the illusions which he so rudely tore away. In dealing with any savage moralist, we are obliged to turn from the abstract question: Why did he say these things? ”

“ To see how completely Vauvenargues rejected the Christian doctrine of the utter decrepitude and hopeless inherent badness of the human mind, we have but to gather some of his sparse thoughts together. He says, in defiance of Pascal and the Jansenists, "Mankind is the only source of our happiness, outside that there is nothing." Again, "As it is the heart, in most people, that doubts, so when once the heart is converted, all is done; it leads them along the path to virtue." ”

“ It is difficult to fancy a young English lieutenant quoting with rapturous approval, as Pierre de Rozières and Henri Lagrange did in August 1914, the counsels which were given more than a hundred years ago by the Prince de Ligne: "Let your brain swim with enthusiasm! Let honour electrify your heart! Let the holy flame of victory shine in your eyes! as you hoist the glorious ensigns of renown let your souls be in like measure uplifted!" ”

“ Under the pseudonym of Clazomène, just before his death, he drew a picture of his own fortune and character which proves that he had no illusion about himself, and which yet contains not a murmur against the injustice of fate nor a breath of petulance or resentment. "Let no one imagine," this portrait closes, "that Clazomène would exchange his wretchedness for the prosperity of weak men; fortune may sport with the wisdom of brave souls, but it has no power to subdue their courage." ”

“ From the first, this lad of twenty-one exemplified and taught the value of a chivalrous behaviour. In the face of events, in that corruption of all which could make the martial spirit seem noble, that Germany has forced upon the world, this attitude of young French officers at the very opening of the war is pathetic, and might even lend itself, if we were disposed for mirth, to an ironic smile. But it should be recorded and not forgotten. It was Allard who revived the etiquette of going to battle dressed as sprucely as for a wedding. ”

“ This chateau, built just two hundred years before that date, still exists, a noble relic of feudal France, and a place of pilgrimage for lovers of the author of the "Maximes."
No one was ever more suddenly and more completely cured of a whole system of existence than was La Rochefoucauld by the wound which was so nearly fatal. He said, "It is impossible for any man who has escaped from civil war to plunge into it again." For him, at all events, it was impossible. His only wish in 1653 was to bury himself and his slow convalescence among his woods at Verteuil. ”

“ What has been the source of the spirit of self-immolation which has driven the intellectual and imaginative section of French youth to hold out both hands to catch the full downpour of the rain of death? ”

“ Pascal, less haughty but more overwhelming, had said, "Insect that you are, doomed to damnation, cease to strive against your own miserable impotence." La Bruyère's teaching was not so definite, partly because his intellect was not so systematic as theirs, but partly because he was more human than either, human with more than a touch of the modern democratic humanity. His attitude was the easier one implied in the sense that "there is so much that's good in the worst of us, and so much that's bad in the best of us" that there is room, even among moralists, for an infinite indulgence. ”

“ His desire, therefore, is not, as that of the seventeenth-century moralists had been, to put human egotism in the pillory and to pelt it with rotten eggs, but so far as possible to encourage and affirm a decent, self-respecting egotism. Vauvenargues finds the lock of life to be rusty; he touches it with the oiled feather of his advice, so that the key may turn without resistance, and without noise. He does not profess to strive after perfection in conduct, but after improvement, and he is most careful never to recommend violent means or an excessive austerity ”

“ The surface of La Bruyère's writing is crisp and parched, but it is easy by careful reading to crack it, and to discover the coolness, the softness, the salutary humidity which lie beneath the satirical crust of his irony. He is primarily a satirist, dealing as he says with the vices of the human mind and the subterfuges of human self-deception. He lays bare "the sentiments and the movements of men, exposing the principles which actuate their malice and their frailty" ”

“ There have always been, and always will be, people who experience a sort of malaise, an ill-defined discomfort, as though they sat in an east wind, while they read La Rochefoucauld. This is particularly true of Englishmen, who resent being told that "Our virtues are often only our vices in disguise," and who also, by the way, are constitutionally impatient of the French genius for making what is ugly, and even what is detestable, pleasing by the surface of style. ”

“ The value which the higher authority sets on the cultivation of moral enthusiasm is exemplified by the fact that the French Ministry of War has encouraged the publication of those personal records, from which we have here made a selection, on the ground that they carry throughout the army a contagion of energy and courage. We are far here from the obscure jealousy of thought which made a military representative of the British War Office the other day lay down the brilliant axiom "A hairdresser is of more value to the country at war than a librarian!" ”

“ Even when we appear to be most disinterested, even when we are most clearly actuated by unselfish devotion, by honour, we are really the prey, as Lintier saw it, of the wish to save our lives and to preserve the good opinion of others. Underneath the transports of patriotism, underneath the sincerity of religious fervour, the Frenchman digs down and finds amour-propre at the root of everything. ”

“ Very interesting it is to note, in the delicately scrupulous record of the mind and conscience of Paul Lintier, how, side by side with this uplifted patriotic confidence, the weakness of the flesh makes itself felt. At Tailly, full of the hope of coming battle, waiting in the moonlit forest for the sound of approaching German guns, suddenly the heroism drops from him, and he murmurs the plaintive verses of the old poet Joachim du Bellay to the echo of "Et je mourrai peut-être demain!" ”

“ Yet again, he defines the subject of his mordant volume in terms which seem to exclude all bountiful theories concerning the disinterested instincts of the human soul, for he says "Amour-propre is the love of one's self and of all things for one's self; it turns men into their own idolators, and, if fortune gives them the opportunity, makes them the tyrants of others.... It exists in all states of life and in all conditions; it lives everywhere and it lives on everything; it lives on nothing." ”

“ It distinguishes Vauvenargues at once from all the great French moralists who preceded him, from La Rochefoucauld with his savage cynicism, from Pascal with his contempt of the natural man. Vauvenargues rejected the idea which had so tormented the great spirits of the seventeenth century, that the noblest life was a life of mortification, and he made no demand on the soul to divorce itself from all human interests as being things naturally vile and ignominious. He was to come down to us waving an olive-branch, the most amiable of all idealists, an apostle of tolerance. ”